Ethics Commission director says Marks case should be dropped

The executive director of the Florida Commission on Ethics says the commission should accept an administrative-law judge’s recommendation when it meets later this month and drop charges against Tallahassee Mayor John Marks.

The Ethics Commission charged Marks on June 15 with five violations of state law over votes he cast involving Honeywell, one of the city’s smart-meter vendors and a major client of the mayor’s law firm at the time, and the Alliance for Digital Equality, a nonprofit that paid the mayor as a member of its board of advisers and was involved in a federally funded broadband project with the city that ultimately was canceled.

After a one-day hearing Oct. 8, Diane Guillemette, a senior assistant attorney general who acts as a prosecutor for the Ethics Commission, asked Administrative Law Judge Lawrence P. Stevenson to recommend penalties against Marks including $30,000 in fines and public reprimand.

But Stevenson, in his recommended order Nov. 28, said charges against Marks should be dropped because of a lack of clear and convincing evidence. The Ethics Commission meets Jan. 25 to take final action on the matter.

In a recent memo to ethics commissioners, Virlindia Doss, executive director of the Ethics Commission, wrote that Florida’s ethics laws limit the commission’s ability to reject or modify findings and conclusions in Lawrence’s recommended order and that commission staff opted against filing any exceptions challenging it.

“Therefore,” she wrote, ” the matter comes before the commission for final agency action, and the commission should enter a final order and public report which adopts the recommended order in its entirety.”